December 4, 2014

International Politics and Conflict Resolution

José Manuel Pureza

This thesis challenges the prevailing academic perspectives and international practices regarding post-war contexts. It sustains that these perspectives are based on a binary thinking that establishes opposite categories and periods such as war and peace, political and criminal, reproduction and resistance. This limited outlook, it is argued, prevents the thorough comprehension of the relations, continuities and mimesis that connect the periods and logics of war and peace. Therefore, mainstream International Relations and even some Peace and Conflict Studies perspectives tend to ignore the multiple forms of everyday violences as well as the processes of production of social and political margins and their reconfiguration throughout history. At the same time, these perspectives tend to propagate stereotyped views of the groups at the margins of power, namely of youngsters in peripheral countries and societies, and portray them as threats to international security, ignoring local suffering and the particular paths through which violences are reproduced. Furthermore, they also tend to overlook the role of international actors and dynamics in the production of violence and neglect the examination of the dynamics of resistance and nonviolence in everyday life, privileging instead an exploration of the behaviour of formal political actors. Conversely, this thesis adopts an alternative analysis approach, examining two distinct contexts: El Salvador and Guinea-Bissau. Drawing upon the experiences and perceptions of non privileged youth, in urban contexts characterised by continuous adversities, it questions the utility and the relevance of academic and intervention frameworks that tend to equate post-war with post-crisis and post-violences and rather reveals the permanence and pervasiveness of war, crisis and violence in everyday life. In these contexts, everyday experiences of violence, suffering and impossibility reveal fragments of war in peacetimes as well as fragments of resistance in the midst of violence reproduction and domination. Furthermore, these everyday violences reveal a genealogy of violences and of power distribution, which are also influenced by international actors and policies. Finally, this analysis leads us to reconsider the rigid distinctions between old and new violences, political and non-political violence, political and non-political actors, perpetrators and victims, more relevant groups and less relevant groups, the local and the international.